When You Should Hyphenate, Open, or Close a Compound Word

And why getting compounds right matters

Karen DeGroot Carter
The Writing Cooperative
4 min readAug 2, 2020

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Loupe view of the word GRAMMAR.
Image from PDPics from Pixabay

The concept of compound words is simple to understand, but using compound words correctly can sometimes prove challenging to writers. The trick is to understand how a term is being used — as a noun, a compound adjective that precedes the noun it modifies, a compound adjective that follows the noun it…

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